I’m a guy, early 50’s. I cry pretty easily, and always have.
Funerals always get to me. Sometimes weddings also, especially when I know the bride real well, and if she starts shedding the tears.
Plenty off occasions when watching a tv show where it’s a real sad or happy ending.
Sometimes those Facebook/Youtube happy or sad links will get to me
I remember one time that my nephew had a very small growth removed from his lip when he was 1 year old. Went over to my sisters the next day to see him. All it took was a few seconds of looking at him with a small bandage, and the tears started.
I gain respect for someone who isn’t ashamed to let the tears flow. Nothing wrong with it at all.
And your point…? The amount of time that has passed is irrelevant. Especially if the original grief was buried and not expressed. The feelings can be frozen in time and triggered by…almost anything.
Jeez I hope I’m not getting the old weepy guy syndrome, but I read a book just today that made me get all weepy, even though I knew where it was going right from the first page. It was in Spanish, too.
What precisely is “the old weepy guy syndrome”??? That’s what I’m trying to figure out. Is it better to read something beautiful, tender, sad, and NOT feel a goddam thing? Why is that something to aspire to?
In the past, I might have felt the emotion, but not got all teary-eyed and snot-nosed. I think it’s feeling like you’re losing control over the external expression of emotion, which men are taught to avoid.
Male, white, mid-sixties, raised by Midwest farm kids - no nonsense, God-Fearing Salt-of-the Earth types.
Cried over ‘the one that got away’, my mother’s death (more the fact that she had wasted her life than that she had died), and when I learned that ‘the one that got away’ had ended up dead at age 50 of a hideous disease after loosing the life she had wanted ten years earlier.
I eventually learned not to go looking for people of my youth. Too many obits - especially the ‘bad ending’ obits.
How do I feel about crying? it happens. I haven’t become either more or less likely to cry with age, just ‘it happens sometimes’.
No big deal either way.
I don’t want to cry ever. It does nothing for me except messes up my makeup and contact lenses (or if I’m not wearing makeup, it just messes up my lenses). I cry if anybody else is crying, at EVERY movie ever made, including comedies, tragedies, westerns, chick-flicks, the cartoon, the previews. Oddly enough the movies I’m least likely to cry at are the ones trying hardest to elicit it (Terms of Endearment). It doesn’t seem to have a lot to do with my actual emotions. I would really like to just never do it except in situations where it’s expected (funerals, weddings). I wish I knew how to do that.
I am okay with people who cry, except for the fact that I will cry along with them. Would love to be able to suppress it.
Mad Magazine did a pictorial article, “You Know You’re Grown Up When . . .”. back on the 1960’s or early 70’s or thereabouts. I don’t remember who did it, but I can’t imagine it not being Dave Berg.
ETA: Googling for it, on the Hail Mary hope that it might be found somewhere, I see some mention of the title attributed to someone else, but that’s about it.
The same thing happened to me, and hit about at age 45. Took me quite by surprise. A co-worker left the company where I was working, and it made me all grizzly and sniffly. Also, the movie “Amadeus.” Whoo! I wasn’t expecting that! It never would have made my thirty-year-old self weepy-eyed!
As above: getting watery-eyed at things that wouldn’t have had that effect when younger. An upswing in being sentimental, as a change from the habits of one’s youth.
It isn’t really a bad thing. It just came as a surprise to me, and at an age when one is becoming more naturally conservative than before. Changes, when one gets up to a certain age, are no longer as welcome as they once were. Also, it feels a little like a loss of control, a kind of incontinence.
That said…it actually makes sentimental scenes in movies more moving, more appealing. Y’know how little kids really hate the smoochy scenes in movies? “Aw, kissing? Yuck!” Well, we old farts really love those scenes!
I used to cry a lot as a teen and was badly teased for it. By the time I was 20, I rarely cried at all.
The teasing and “crybaby” insults were no doubt a part of it, but a small part. I tend to stay on an even keel – I also almost never get mad, either. I understand my grandfather (who died before I was born) was the same way.
The last time I cried for any length of time was when I lost my job in 1983. I shed a few tears at my father’s funeral (though when I put a hand on his coffin, it stopped) and I surprised myself with tears of joy when I read the end of Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed.
I do love good, honest sentiment in movies, but it doesn’t make me cry.
I think because it perceived is a “womanly” thing and we all know how much respect women have gotten. It’s why we still revere cowardly people as “pussies” and tell people to “man up”. And “Stop being such a girl”.
If crying is just tears, then I cry all the time, it seems – tears seem to come very easily to me, from funny jokes and happy moments to tragic movies and television (these are silent tears, only occasionally pooling enough to actually escape my eye and stream down my face, with no alteration in my facial expression either way). But if crying is the full-on scrunched-face, moaning/wailing, tears streaming down the face, handkerchief required… then I can’t remember the last time I cried.
So your premise is that one cannot feel emotion without a physical response? I think you are wrong. In fact, I know you are. I felt as deep a sadness as anyone, except perhaps my mother, when my father died. I was as overjoyed as anyone when my daughter married and then again when my grandson was born. All of those emotions were real and raw, but none resulted in tears. Would I cry were my wife to die? I don’t know, perhaps. But rest assured, it would be felt deeply.
I’m a guy, and I cry somewhat often. I was raised to believe that crying is somehow unmanly, and there was a period of years where I didn’t cry. However, as I’ve gotten older, it’s occurred to me just how stupid that idea is. Crying is a natural way of expressing stress, emotion, pain, whatever; it’s really not all that different from laughter other than that laughter is often associated with pleasurable stimuli and crying with negative. However, I’ll do either for pretty much any type of stimulus.
All of that said, I am not ashamed of when I cry or laugh. In fact, I remember I had a discussion about a year and a half ago with some friends about movies we’d cried at. I think some of them mentioned one or two, but I can name a lot. Hell, I cried as recently as at The Martian which, for anyone that’s seen it, probably isn’t difficult to guess when. Anyway, they seemed shocked that I was willing to admit the number of films I’d cried at.
But altogether, it just seems funny to me. Somehow crying is bad, but men can channel their emotions into more aggressive outlets and it’s considered manly. It seems to me that if one feels the desire to cry, it’s healthier than either trying to bottle it up or express it in a less suitable way. And, of course, in antiquity, there’s many stories of men crying, whether in the Bible or epic poems like the Odyssey or Beowulf. The sensitivity that crying displays used to be a sign of passion, artistry, fraternity, but somewhere along that line it became just a sign of frailty and weakness and something exclusively feminine, so men who did it were sissies and castigated for it. And now it seems even women are starting to get flak for crying at times it was acceptable not that long ago. It’s almost as if passion and sensitivity as virtues are being downplayed. Frankly, I think that’s a travesty.
And back to one of my original observations: crying in public is referred to by the media as “Breaking down” in headlines, as though it were some unnatural, weak failure of character. This mystifies me.
